Sakuntalá. Other dramas; bhárata and Rámáyana appear in the Sanskrit drama as part of the popular literature,-in fact, as occupying very much the saine position which they still hold. No dramas are known to exist among the works which the Hindus who emigrated to Java, about 500 A.D., carried with them to their new homes. Nor have any dramas been yet found among the Tibetan translations of the Sanskrit classics. The most famous drama of Kálidása is Sakuntalá, or the 'Lost Ring.' Like the ancient epics, it divides its action between the court of the king and the hermitage in the forest. Prince Dushyanta, an ancestor of the noble Lunar race, weds by an irregular marriage a beautiful maiden, Sakuntalá, at her father's hermitage in the jungle. Before returning to his capital, he gives his bride a ring as a pledge of his love; but smitten by a curse from a holy man, she loses the ring, and cannot be recognised by her husband till it is found. Sakuntalá bears a son in her loneliness, and sets out to claim recognition for herself and child at her husband's court. But she is as one unknown to the prince, till, after many sorrows and trials, the ring comes to light. She is then happily reunited with her husband, and her son grows up to be the noble Bharata, the chief founder of the Lunar dynasty whose achievements form the theme of the Mahábhárata. Sakuntalá, like Sítá, is the type of the chaste and faithful Hindu wife; and her love and sorrow, after forming the favourite romance of the Indian people for perhaps eighteen hundred years, have furnished a theme for the great European poet of our age. 'Wouldst thou,' says Goethe, 'Wouldst thou the young year's blossoms, and the fruits of its decline, Sakuntala has had the good fortune to be translated by Sir William Jones (1789), and to be sung by Goethe. But other of the Hindu dramas and domestic poems are of almost equal interest and beauty. As examples of the classical period, may be taken the Mrichchakatí, or 'Toy Cart,' a drama in ten Sanskrit, acts, on the old theme of the innocent cleared and the guilty punished; and the poem of Nala and Damayanti, or the ‘Royal Gambler and the Faithful Wife.' Such plays and poems quently take an episode of the Mahábhárata or Rámáyana for their subject; and in this way the main incidents in the two great epics have been gradually dramatized or reduced to the still more popular form of household song. The modern fre MODERN PLAYS: OLD BEAST STORIES. 127 drama was one of the first branches of Hindu secular literature and which accepted the spoken dialects; and the native theatre modern. forms the best, indeed the only, school in which an Englishman can acquaint himself with the in-door life of the people. dramatic novel. In our own day there has been a great dramatic revival Recent in India: new plays in the vernacular tongues issue rapidly revival. from the press; and societies of patriotic young natives form themselves into dramatic companies, especially in Calcutta and Bombay. Many of the pieces are vernacular renderings of stories from the Sanskrit epics and classical dramas. Several have a political significance, and deal with the phases of development upon which India has entered under the influence of British rule. One Bengáli play, the Nil-darpan,1 or the 'Indigo Factory,' became the subject of a celebrated trial in Calcutta ; while others—such as Ekei ki bale Sabhyatá? 'Is this what you call civilisation?'-suggests many serious thoughts to a candid English mind. In 1877, 102 dramas were published in India in the native tongues; and in 1882, 245. Closely allied to the drama is the prose romance. In 1823, The Dr. H. H. Wilson intimated that Hindu literature contained Hidu collections of domestic narrative to an extent surpassing those of any other people. The vast growth of European fiction since that date renders this statement no longer accurate. But Wilson's translations from the Vrihat-kathá may still be read with interest, and the Sanskrit Beast-stories now occupy an Beasteven more significant place in the history of Indo-European stories; literature than they did then. Many fables of animals familiar to the western world, from the time of Æsop downwards, had their original home in India. The relation between the fox and the lion in the Greek versions has no reality in nature. It was based, however, upon the actual relation between the lion and his follower the jackal, in the Sanskrit stories.3 Weber thinks that complete cycles of Indian fables may have existed in the time of Pánini (350 B.C.). It is known that the Sanskrit Panchatantra, or Book of Beast Tales, was translated into the ancient their Persian as early as the 6th century A.D., and from that render- spread ing all the subsequent versions in Asia Minor and Europe have wards. been derived. The most ancient animal fables of India are at Literally, The Mirror of Indigo.' 2 Oriental Quarterly Magazine, Calcutta, March 1824, pp. 63-77. Also vol. iii. of Wilson's Collected Works, pp. 156-268. London, 1864. 3 See, however, Weber's elaborate footnote, No. 221, for the other view, Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 211. Max Müller's charming essay on the Migration of Fables (Chips, vol. iv. pp. 145-209, 1875) traces the actual stages of a well-known story from the East to the West. west Sanskrit lyric poetry. The Puránas, 8th to 16th century A.D. Contents of the Puránas. Their sects. the present day the nursery stories of England and America. The graceful Hindu imagination delighted also in fairy tales; and the Sanskrit compositions of this class are the original source of many of the fairy tales of Persia, Arabia, and Christendom. The works of fiction published in the native languages in India in 1877 numbered 196; and in 1882, 237. In medieval India, a large body of poetry, half-religious, halfamorous, grew up around the legend of the youthful Krishna. (the eighth incarnation of Vishnu) and his loves with the shepherdesses, the playmates of his sweet pastoral life. Kálidása, according to Hindu tradition, was the father of the erotic lyric, as well as a great dramatic and epic poet. In his Megha-dúta or 'Cloud Messenger,' an exile sends a message by a wind-borne cloud to his love, and the countries beneath its long aerial route are made to pass like a panorama before the reader's eye. The Gita Govinda, or Divine Herdsman of Jayadeva, is a Sanskrit 'Song of Solomon' of the 12th century A.D. A festival once a year celebrates the birthplace of this mystical love-poet, in the Birbhum District of Lower Bengal; and many less famous compositions of the same. class now issue from the vernacular press throughout India. In 1877, no fewer than 697 works of poetry were published in the native languages in India; and in 1882, 834. The medieval Bráhmans displayed a marvellous activity in theological as well as in lyric poetry. The Puránas, literally 'The Ancient Writings,' form a collection of religious and philosophical treatises in verse, of which the principal ones number eighteen. The whole Puránas are said to contain 1,600,000 lines. The really old ones have either been lost or been incorporated in new compilations; and the composition of the existing Puránas probably took place from the 8th to the 16th century A.D. As the epics sang the wars of the Aryan heroes, so the Puránas recount the deeds of the Bráhman gods. They deal with the creation of the universe; its successive dissolutions and reconstructions; the stories of the deities and their incarnations; the reigns of the divine Manus; and the chronicles of the Solar and Lunar lines of kings who ruled, the former in the east and the latter in the west of the Middle Land (Madhya-desha). The Puránas belong to the period after the mass of the people had split up into their two existing divisions, as worshippers of Vishnu or of Siva, post, 700 A.D. They are INDIAN LITERARY ACTIVITY, 1882. 129 devoted to the glorification of one or other of these two rival gods, and thus embody the sectarian theology of Bráhmanism. While claiming to be founded on Vedic inspira- Their tion, they practically superseded the Veda, and have formed influence. during ten centuries the sacred literature on which Hinduism rests.1 An idea of the literary activity of the Indian mind at the Indian present day may be formed from the fact, that 4890 works were works published published in India in 1877, of which 4346 were in the native in 1877 languages. Only 436 were translations, the remaining 4454 being original works or new editions. The number of Indian publications constantly increases. In 1882, 6198 works were and 1882. published in India, 5543 being in the native languages. The translations numbered 720, and the original works, including new editions, 5478. These figures only show the publications officially registered under the Act. A large number of unregistered pamphlets or brochures must be added; together with the daily and weekly issue of vernacular newspapers, exceeding 230 in number and circulating over 150,000 copies. Regarding their It has, indeed, This chapter has attempted to trace the intellectual and Absence of religious development of the early Aryans in India, and their territorial. history. constitution into castes and communities. territorial history, it has said almost nothing. indicated their primeval line of march from their Holy Land among the seven rivers of the Punjab, to their Land of the Sacred Singers between the upper courses of the Jumna and the Ganges; and thence to their more extensive settlements in the Middle Land of Bengal (Madhya-desha) stretching to beyond the junction of these two great rivers. It has also told very briefly the legend of their advance into Southern India, in the epic rendering of the Rámáyana. But the foregoing pages have refrained from attempts to fix the dates or to fill in the 1 The foregoing pages have very briefly reviewed the most important branches of Sanskrit literature; the influence of that literature upon Hinduism will be dealt with in a subsequent chapter. To fully appreciate the connection between ancient thought and present practice in India, the student may also refer to Professor Monier Williams' Modern India and the Indians (Trübner, 1879). That work unites the keen observation of a traveller new to the country with the previous learning acquired during a lifetime devoted to Oriental studies. Professor Monier Williams is thus enabled to correlate the existing phenomena of Indian life with the historical types which underlie them. VOL. VI. I Its induc details of these movements. For the territorial extension of the Aryans in India is still a battle-ground of inductive history. Even for a much later period of Indian civilisation, the tive data. data continue under keen dispute. This will be amply apparent in the following chapters.1 These chapters will open with the great upheaval of Buddhism against Bráhmanism in the 6th century before Christ. They will summarize the struggles of the Asiatic races in India during a period of twenty-three hundred years. They will close with the great military revival of Hinduism under the Maráthá Bráhmans in the 18th century of our era. An attempt will then be made, from the evidence of the vernacular literature and languages, to present a view of Indian thought and culture, when the European nations came in force upon the scene. The Bráhmans in Indian history. The six attacks on Bráhmanism, 6th century B.C. to 19th cen tury A.D. Meanwhile, the history of India, so far as obscurely known to us before the advent of the Greeks, 327 B.C., is essentially a literary history, and the memorials of its civilisations are mainly literary or religious memorials. The more practical aspects of those long ages, which were their real aspects to the people, found no annalist. From the commencement of the post-Vedic period, the Bráhmans strove with increasing success to bring the Aryan life and civilisation of India more and more into accord with their own priestly ideas. In order to understand the long domination of the Brahmans, and the influence which they still wield, it is necessary also to keep in mind their position as the great literary caste. Their priestly supremacy has been repeatedly assailed, and was during a space of nearly a thousand years overpowered by Buddhism. But throughout twenty-two centuries the Brahmans have been the counsellors of Hindu princes and the teachers of the Hindu people. They still represent the early Aryan civilisation of India. Indeed, the essential history of India is a narrative of the attacks upon the continuity of their civilisation, that is to say, of attacks upon the Bráhmanical system of the Middle Land, and of the modifications and compromises to which that system has had to submit. 1 Namely, on Buddhism, the Greeks in India, the Scythic Inroads, the Rise of Hinduism, Early Muhammadan Rulers, the Mughal Empire, and the Maráthá Power. We still await the complete evidence of coins and inscriptions; although valuable materials have been already obtained from these silent memorials of the past. Mr. K. T. Telang's Introduction to the Mudrárákshasa, with Appendix, shows what can be gathered from a minute and critical examination of the historical data incidentally contained in the Hindu drama. |